He is my boyfriend, we both studied BSc (Hons) Forensic Computing so yes he does know.

Thank you for your concern...

You are welcome , I am sure a lot of e-mail harvester will appreciate this.

Just in case, besides the opportunity of posting a third-party e-mail address on a public forum, it is not particularly "smart" (unless you are putting together an e-mail spam honeypot) to publish on a public forum *any* e-mail including your own.

Much more loosely, wouldn't it be easier/nicer to publish the actual dissertation by uploading it to a web hosting service, blog, etc. and post the web address to it?

jaclaz
_________________- In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. -

While not being a scientific research in a fully scientific view, this is still a pretty good snapshot of the state-of-the-art in SSD forencics by Sept. 2012. As far as I know, little changed since then. 500GB SSD's have been introduced, some Samsung drives broke previous price-per-gigabyte records, but that was about it.

SSD forensics remains being hit-or-miss. With SSD's, we're well into probabilistic forensics territory. TRIM may or may not work depending on how the drive was connected, which operating system, what file system, and what exactly was done to the data being destroyed. Crypto containers stored on SSD volumes are yet another matter and are also hit-or-miss, as some manufacturers enable garbage collection within their containers (normally with an option that's disabled by default) and some don't.

In a word, if a fairly modern SSD was used in a Windows 7 PC, connected internally via ATA, formatted with NTFS, no crypto containers, and some data was deleted, then probably that data is now gone. If any one of these conditions is not satisfied (e.g. Vista, or USB connection, or formatted with FAT, or data was stored within a crypto container, or the disk was corrupted - in which case the TRIM command is not being issued), then there are good chances that even deleted data can be restored with carving.

Otherwise, you'll only get whatever files are available (as in "not deleted").

C'mon guys, gmlw0908 helpfully suggested a potentially useful source of information. Whether or not she's happy to post an email address publicly or share the paper more broadly is really up to her - I don't see any need for these responses. If we genuinely want to encourage students to share their research, this isn't the way to do it.